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Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class, and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics
From one of the nation's best-known social justice leaders and community activists comes a strategic and informed argument about the pitfalls of limited political vision, and the benefits of an agenda that encompasses, yet moves beyond, equality.
The LGBT movement is on one of the most active, contested, and engaging social movements in the world. This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.
Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.
The LGBT movement is on one of the most active, contested, and engaging social movements in the world. This optimistic book challenges advocates for LGBT rights in the U.S. to aspire beyond the narrow framework of equality. It outlines a more substantive politics with race, class, and gender at its foundation, and suggests that such a politics will produce greater and more meaningful change for a larger number of people.
Irresistible Revolution is intended for a broad and general audience. The book turns an experienced and thoughtful lens onto many common controversies, rhetoric, and strategic questions that face contemporary social change movements: pursuit of broad or narrow agendas, integration of economic and racial justice, integrating sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights frameworks, the persistence of sexism, the dilemmas of bipartisanship, and the challenge of seeing beyond the short term to secure gains made for the long run.
220 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 29, 2012
8 people are currently reading
466 people want to read
About the author
Urvashi Vaid
7 books22 followersUrvashi Vaid is an Indian-American LGBT rights activist. She received a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston in 1983, where she founded the Boston Lesbian/Gay Political Alliance, a non-partisan political organization that interviews and endorses candidates for political office and advocates for Boston's gay community. Her books are "Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation" and "Irresistable Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics."
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 20, 2015
As usual, Vaid knocks it out of the park. "Irresistible Revolution" offers a cogent analysis of the intersections of LGBTQ politics with race and class. She calls the movement out on its racism and classism and offers clear ways forward. Those ways could lead to a truly progressive movement working towards a society free of not only homophobia and transphobia but also of racism, classism, xenophobia, and all of the other -ism's and -phobia's that keep us divided from each other and that keep important parts of our community, country, and world oppressed and marginalized.
My one complaint: Vaid frequently falls into the unfortunate trap of erasing bisexual lives and identities. She does fine, of course, with using the full "LGBT" acronym (although the "Q" is pretty much always missing). But she frequently refers, for example, just to lesbians when many times bisexual women are just as impacted by a particular topic as their lesbian sisters. This erasure is difficult for a radical, queer, Gen Xer to take -- especially when it comes from someone who is otherwise so spot-on politically. Hopefully, Vaid can work on centering bisexual lives and experiences in her writing, her thinking, and her politics. That would likely eliminate this problem in her writing and speeches.
Otherwise, an excellent book that i highly recommend.
My one complaint: Vaid frequently falls into the unfortunate trap of erasing bisexual lives and identities. She does fine, of course, with using the full "LGBT" acronym (although the "Q" is pretty much always missing). But she frequently refers, for example, just to lesbians when many times bisexual women are just as impacted by a particular topic as their lesbian sisters. This erasure is difficult for a radical, queer, Gen Xer to take -- especially when it comes from someone who is otherwise so spot-on politically. Hopefully, Vaid can work on centering bisexual lives and experiences in her writing, her thinking, and her politics. That would likely eliminate this problem in her writing and speeches.
Otherwise, an excellent book that i highly recommend.
January 20, 2019
A collection of talks given in the late 90s and early 2000s on a variety of topics surrounding race, class, and feminism in the mainstream LGBT movement ini the U.S. by a well-known activist. Through these essays Vaid critiques the mainstream movement and highlights ways in which it can and should be more inclusive and broad. While dated, it was still really interesting reading this collection now. It's easy to see the ways in which the issues highlighted remained or were even further entrenched, and the issues that has caused. Most of her suggestions are still very relevant today, especially in our current political climate.
December 31, 2022
She was a deep policy wonk, and a great visionary. Parts are a little slow-going. She will, of course, be greatly and forever missed. We need her still!
November 5, 2012
Addressing the Truths, the Struggles, the Victories and the Possibilities
For the past thirty years the beautiful and very wise Urvashi Vaid has been one of the major spokespersons for social justice and her particular emphasis has been on the bringing to the attention of the world public the struggle of the LGBT community. Now in this engrossing book she offers nine essays that embrace subjects of profound concern to her - and to all citizens who truly care about equality and civil rights. To read this book is to absorb her passion and to understand better how various groups singled out by society as `different' deserve equal status on every level of life.
Vaid comes to this book with a solid background deeply entrenched in intellectual research and with the training as an attorney. She is currently the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, and her past experiences include attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project and executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Her credentials offer solid proof that the essays she shares in this book are informed by both analysis and personal experience.
To quote Vaid from her Introduction, `Several concerns motivate the essays in this book, and they set the context for my argument that an innovative LGBT movement must move beyond seeking reform of laws to maximizing the life-chances, freedom, and self-determination of all LGBT people. First, is the ever-clearer truth that eh battle for the full acceptance of queer people is cultural, or a struggle about the values that guide the societies in which we live, as much as it is a political struggle for reform of laws. California and Uganda teach the same lesson: LGBT people will continue to lose at the polls and will face outrageous attempts to deprive us of full citizenship, to criminalize our relationships, and even to institute the death penalty against us, if we do not contest the denigration of our lives by religious and political leaders who appoint themselves arbiters of the great moral codes ad traditions developed by humankind.....Second, although the LGBT movement sits within a global, plural, and multiracial world, its leadership remains predominately white, male, and economically privileged. Hard-earned experienced with life and death struggles against HIV/AIDS, violence, state repression, religious fundamentalisms, and political demagoguery teaches us of the need to expand the movement's leadership, broaden its agenda and programs to reflect the lives of people of color in the US and non-Western countries, and to develop new organizing strategies and messages ....Third, it is clear that resistance to gender equality is a profound obstacle not just for women, but also for transgender persons, bisexual people, gay men, and lesbians....' Rarely has an author been able to summarize the essence of a book's purpose so succinctly.
In the essays that follow Urvashi Vaid addresses each the points she suggest in her introduction and she writes in such an accessible fashion that she is even able to introduce humor into her presentation of aspects of her convictions that she so adroitly discusses. With the greatest of ease she dispels current myths and transgressive situations she so carefully analyzes and explains AND to which she offers corrective changes. Another aspect of her writing is her comfort level in sharing her personal life as an example: it is never `they' or `we' but instead it is the global community she addresses. `I am an Indian woman, born in New Dehli,. I am an immigrant woman, who came with my family to America as an eight-year-old child and became a United States citizen. I am a lesbian - a woman who loves other women - by virtue of my natural sexual orientation....My identity is bicultural, and my sexuality is fully integrated into my identity. When I struggle for equality as a woman, against racism or ethnic prejudice, these struggles are indivisible; indeed to me they are one.'
Urvashi Vaid is clearly one of our most important social leaders and everyone who cares about freedom and equality should read her words of wisdom and concern. Highly recommended.
Grady Harp
For the past thirty years the beautiful and very wise Urvashi Vaid has been one of the major spokespersons for social justice and her particular emphasis has been on the bringing to the attention of the world public the struggle of the LGBT community. Now in this engrossing book she offers nine essays that embrace subjects of profound concern to her - and to all citizens who truly care about equality and civil rights. To read this book is to absorb her passion and to understand better how various groups singled out by society as `different' deserve equal status on every level of life.
Vaid comes to this book with a solid background deeply entrenched in intellectual research and with the training as an attorney. She is currently the Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at Columbia Law School's Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, and her past experiences include attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project and executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Her credentials offer solid proof that the essays she shares in this book are informed by both analysis and personal experience.
To quote Vaid from her Introduction, `Several concerns motivate the essays in this book, and they set the context for my argument that an innovative LGBT movement must move beyond seeking reform of laws to maximizing the life-chances, freedom, and self-determination of all LGBT people. First, is the ever-clearer truth that eh battle for the full acceptance of queer people is cultural, or a struggle about the values that guide the societies in which we live, as much as it is a political struggle for reform of laws. California and Uganda teach the same lesson: LGBT people will continue to lose at the polls and will face outrageous attempts to deprive us of full citizenship, to criminalize our relationships, and even to institute the death penalty against us, if we do not contest the denigration of our lives by religious and political leaders who appoint themselves arbiters of the great moral codes ad traditions developed by humankind.....Second, although the LGBT movement sits within a global, plural, and multiracial world, its leadership remains predominately white, male, and economically privileged. Hard-earned experienced with life and death struggles against HIV/AIDS, violence, state repression, religious fundamentalisms, and political demagoguery teaches us of the need to expand the movement's leadership, broaden its agenda and programs to reflect the lives of people of color in the US and non-Western countries, and to develop new organizing strategies and messages ....Third, it is clear that resistance to gender equality is a profound obstacle not just for women, but also for transgender persons, bisexual people, gay men, and lesbians....' Rarely has an author been able to summarize the essence of a book's purpose so succinctly.
In the essays that follow Urvashi Vaid addresses each the points she suggest in her introduction and she writes in such an accessible fashion that she is even able to introduce humor into her presentation of aspects of her convictions that she so adroitly discusses. With the greatest of ease she dispels current myths and transgressive situations she so carefully analyzes and explains AND to which she offers corrective changes. Another aspect of her writing is her comfort level in sharing her personal life as an example: it is never `they' or `we' but instead it is the global community she addresses. `I am an Indian woman, born in New Dehli,. I am an immigrant woman, who came with my family to America as an eight-year-old child and became a United States citizen. I am a lesbian - a woman who loves other women - by virtue of my natural sexual orientation....My identity is bicultural, and my sexuality is fully integrated into my identity. When I struggle for equality as a woman, against racism or ethnic prejudice, these struggles are indivisible; indeed to me they are one.'
Urvashi Vaid is clearly one of our most important social leaders and everyone who cares about freedom and equality should read her words of wisdom and concern. Highly recommended.
Grady Harp
March 25, 2016
I've always admired Urvashi Vaid. Her previous writing that I've read and the talks I've heard her give have always represented in my mind an important intersectional, feminist voice in the LGBT movement, and as the subtitle of this book suggests, she doesn't disappoint. The book is a collection of essays, most of which were lectures she gave in the past ten years or so (there are a few older ones, which are interesting, but a little less timely). As I've been considering readings for a new course I'm designing on justice in LGBTQ movements, I picked this up, hoping it would provide undergraduates with some important frameworks and concepts around how LGBTQ issues intersect with race, class, gender, and other categories of social identity and experiences with oppression. In this way, it's perfect, and each essay tends to highlight a distinct intersection, although as you might imagine there's a great deal of overlap and interconnection (which might be the only flaw here, as there is some repetition of ideas, especially in later essays). I found her essays on race and class in the opening section some of the more useful and potentially provocative. But the essays in the second half of the book on ending patriarch, LGBT faith-based organizing, and LGBT politics in the age of Obama (and moving beyond marriage equality, were also very much worth reading. Through it all, Vaid writes with great clarity and sophistication, and layered throughout is a very personal and accessible perspective on movement politics, her role in it, and her recommendations on how we might best continue on in the struggle.
September 20, 2015
As usual, Vaid knocks it out of the park. "Irresistible Revolution" offers a cogent analysis of the intersections of LGBTQ politics with race and class. She calls the movement out on its racism and classism and offers clear ways forward. Those ways could lead to a truly progressive movement working towards a society free of not only homophobia and transphobia but also of racism, classism, xenophobia, and all of the other -ism's and -phobia's that keep us divided from each other and that keep important parts of our community, country, and world oppressed and marginalized.
My one complaint: Vaid frequently falls into the unfortunate trap of erasing bisexual lives and identities. She does fine, of course, with using the full "LGBT" acronym (although the "Q" is pretty much always missing). But she frequently refers, for example, just to lesbians when many times bisexual women are just as impacted by a particular topic as their lesbian sisters. This erasure is difficult for a radical, queer, Gen Xer to take -- especially when it comes from someone who is otherwise so spot-on politically. Hopefully, Vaid can work on centering bisexual lives and experiences in her writing, her thinking, and her politics. That would likely eliminate this problem in her writing and speeches.
Otherwise, an excellent book that i highly recommend.
My one complaint: Vaid frequently falls into the unfortunate trap of erasing bisexual lives and identities. She does fine, of course, with using the full "LGBT" acronym (although the "Q" is pretty much always missing). But she frequently refers, for example, just to lesbians when many times bisexual women are just as impacted by a particular topic as their lesbian sisters. This erasure is difficult for a radical, queer, Gen Xer to take -- especially when it comes from someone who is otherwise so spot-on politically. Hopefully, Vaid can work on centering bisexual lives and experiences in her writing, her thinking, and her politics. That would likely eliminate this problem in her writing and speeches.
Otherwise, an excellent book that i highly recommend.
June 30, 2013
This new book by Urvashi Vaid, the former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, combines lectures and essays from throughout Vaid's recent career critiquing both the tunnel vision of mainstream LGBT politics in the nonprofit world and the issues of race, class, and gender that continue to divide our community. Very rarely do people as entangled in the nonprofit sector as Vaid (a former employee at the Ford Foundation) speak as honestly and eloquently about the ways that philanthropy undermines important social justice work. I read this book after I had made the decision not to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector despite my Master of Public Administration degree with a concentration in nonprofit management from American University. Reading this book made me feel even better about my decision than I already did (and I already felt pretty great about it). For me, this was a book that came along at just the right time in my life.
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February 5, 2016Enlightening "call to arms" of a collection of the author's speeches reminding one that for "real equality" one must address this issue broadly, not just as a LGBT issue, but across a wide spectrum of issues and concerns including racism, women's health, family issues, economic justice, youth, the prison system, and the peace movement. Many of the speeches give incite into the history of the LGBT movement with an emphasis on the lesbian contributions to this history.
August 24, 2013
Required reading. Incisive and visionary ....
February 19, 2016
Homegirl will make you think about the political agendas of the early 90s through a very queer and important lens.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews